In the pre-Watergate days of the Nixon Administration, then-Attorney General John Mitchell famously counseled critics to "watch what we do" rather than listen to what that pack of wily dissemblers said. It was good advice at the time, though not sufficiently followed.

The same counsel would have been prudent during the years of Ronald Reagan, and is now as well, in the course of commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 40th president's birth. For all the universal acclaim from the American conservative community for the Age of Reagan, the cold record confirms that the Gipper talked a much better conservative game than he ever played in the White House.

Ronald Reagan was rightly dubbed the Great Communicator for his ability to convey with uncommon clarity and conviction the objectives and intentions of the conservative movement in domestic and foreign policy. They were perhaps most directly offered in his first inauguration address, when he declared concerning America's woes that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

But in the course of Reagan's eight years in power, the federal establishment actually grew in size and reach. And despite his repeated verbal assaults on an overtaxed American public, he acquiesced to more than half-dozen tax increases during his presidency. He repeatedly yielded to the urgings of chief aides like James Baker and Richard Darman, faced with the budget realities of the time.

The magic of Reagan was that in the face of these blatant contradictions of what he said, he could and did continue to say them and have his faithful followers accept his core message as gospel. Part of the magic was in the man's disarming persona and apparent absence of guile. As his fellow Irishmen of earlier days would say, he could talk a dog off a meat wagon.

The onetime movie matinee idol, before, during and after his presidency, was never one to sweat the details. Indeed, he often seemed disconnected from certain realities. He dismissed poverty in America as the conniving of a welfare queen and he imagined visiting Nazi concentration camps when he only edited film of them in Hollywood during World War II.

What Ronald Reagan was consistent about was his view of the big picture, of how government had gotten too big for its britches and how old-fashioned neighbor-helping-neighbor was the answer to everything. He wanted to believe both, and he was a master in enlisting in his ranks millions of Americans who wanted to believe them, too.

The oft-quoted assessment of Democratic wise man Clark Clifford that Reagan was "an amiable dunce" captured the surface aura of this easy-going and eminently likeable fellow. But it underestimated his talent for conveying commitment to age-old verities held also by Americans in all walks of life, and for selling optimism about practicing them.

When his vice president, the senior George Bush, succeeded Reagan in the White House, many Americans hoped or desired that his presidency would be the functional equivalent of a third Reagan term. But it wasn't. For one thing, it had none of the Reagan magic to sell the sizzle without the steak.

In Bush's 1988 nomination acceptance speech, he went too far when he flatly and conspicuously pledged "Read my lips! No new taxes!" -- more Clint Eastwood than Ronnie Reagan. But then Bush couldn't keep the promise and, for this and other reasons, he paid the price in his defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992.

In their rush to wrap themselves in Reagan's cloak, latter-day conservatives almost always remind the public of what the man said and how he said it, rather than of what he actually did to translate the true conservative faith into practical politics.

That's the safest way for these would-be Reagans politically, especially because the Republican Party of today is not the same as it was in his heyday. The GOP still sings Reagan's lyrics, but it doesn't embody the political pragmatism that often convinced him to dance to a different tune. Some of that Reagan style would serve his party well now, rather than the intense Republican obstructionism of the last two years.